Therapeutic foster care program puts family first

Therapeutic foster program puts family first

Abigail Slen and her son, Jermal Muhammed, are photographed at their home in Hamden.

Abigail Slen and her son, Jermal Muhammed, are photographed at their home in Hamden.

Photo: Arnold Gold — New Haven Register

Photo: Arnold Gold — New Haven Register

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Abigail Slen and her son, Jermal Muhammed, are photographed at their home in Hamden.

Abigail Slen and her son, Jermal Muhammed, are photographed at their home in Hamden.

Photo: Arnold Gold — New Haven Register

Therapeutic foster care program puts family first

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NEW HAVEN >> When he was 8, Jermal Muhammad was living in what he described as an orphanage in Windsor Locks.

“I had all this traumatic stuff going on and I always wanted a family,” Muhammad said. “I had a picture of a ‘Daddy Warbucks’ type of thing; the ideas that I had about having a family were extravagant.”

Muhammad said he just wanted someone to care about him.

“I wanted someone to care about me the way I cared about them, as a parent to a son,” Muhammad said.

Muhammad, then one of the youngest in the facility, noted, “The older kids used to run away a lot, I was on board, I wanted to be cool.”

“I didn’t know why we were doing this.” he said.

“I didn’t know what was beyond that, where everybody was going,” Muhammad said.

Muhammad was brought to the The Connection Inc.’s Connecting Children and Families in New Haven, which focuses on therapeutic foster care, but said he doesn’t recall much about the process.

“When I first got to my first family, I remember feeling really awesome, feeling joyful as any kid would be. I liked it and it was awesome,” Muhammad said.

Connecting Children and Families, which has been in operation for 20 years, is an intensive level of foster care for children who may have a mental diagnosis such as PTSD, depression, attachment or bipolar disorder, who may have been hospitalized many times and who need a more therapeutic approach.

Linda Robertson-Matson, recruitment specialist for CCF, said the agency is in need of families who are willing to become foster parents. Robertson-Matson said she currently has five children in need of homes, which she has been searching for over the past few months.

“A typical therapeutic foster care child has had numerous placement disruptions; kids might start out in regular foster care or a sibling group but they were disrupted continually,” said agency Program Director Michele Klimczak. “These kids are not the issue. ... Their issues are more intense.”

Muhammad spent six years with his first family but moved to a different home when he was 14.

That year, he first met his mom, Abigail Slen of Hamden, and the rest of his family.

“The family I was with was going to California and I couldn’t go, so I had to come here (to Slen’s home) for a week,” Muhammad said. “When I came here, I remember thinking ‘Oh, my God, wow, they have a pool,’ and she was really nice.”

Two weeks later, Muhammad moved into the Slen family home on Stonewall Drive.

Despite some struggles transitioning, Muhammad said it was almost perfect right away.

“This is what I really wanted and they were good at giving it back,” he said.

Muhammad, now 26 and living in Atlanta and working as a part of the National Guard, said he can still return home to the Slens’ and feel like he is with his family.

Klimczak said this is one of the primary goals at CCF.

“These are kids who are at a crisis point,” Klimczak said. “Every time you place a child in foster care, you would like to think this is it, but for whatever reason it doesn’t work, they are disrupted, they move, and we hope with therapeutic foster care, the buck stops here.”

Moving toward family engagement

Klimczak said the program focuses on state Department of Children and Families Commissioner Joette Katz’s goal to keep children from growing up in congregate care settings.

“This commissioner is very much invested in exploring kinship care options,” Klimczak said. “Relatives, aunts, grandmother, someone in the neighborhood to become licensed foster care parents for these kids.”

“We are moving towards more family engagement, recognize the need for support from key people whether that is biological family members or someone else, to be supportive of the individual,” said Connection Director of Communications and Fund Development Beth Connor.

Connor said they have 38 different programs statewide and 50 locations. Connecting Children and Families is under the family support part of the organization; Connection also has community justice, behavioral health and housing programs, among others.

Most children who enter the therapeutic foster care program are 11 or 12 and stay until they age out of the system when they turn 18. Klimczak said children who are younger typically do not come to the program. This year, there are 736 children in various therapeutic foster care services in Connecticut.

The one aspect of CCF program where children do not age out works with children who have cognitive limitations. Klimczak said they recruit homes for these children with whom they will stay permanently and the placements are known as a community companion home.

“This is an opportunity to share your home with an older adult who goes to a program during the day, you provide the family involvement to help and support their daily activities,” Klimczak said.

How the agency evolved

When Connecting Children and Families first began, its approach was different then the model used now.

“Once upon a time there was enhanced foster care and professional parenting, permanent foster care,” Klimczak said. “The idea was that this population of kids was so difficult that they probably won’t end up getting adopted and we don’t want to keep moving them around so we called them permanent foster care parents.”

Klimczak said the issue with this was that it discouraged adoption because people didn’t want to lose the services the state and agencies provided them as foster parents.

Robertson-Matson said that their program functions differently now focusing on adoption.

“The idea now is their placement will launch them into their future where their foster family will adopt them, it facilitates, with the help of our program, the reunification with family,” Klimczak said.

“This is a bridge to a child’s future, it is what can get them from where they are to the goals set for them,” Robertson-Matson said.

Robertson-Matson said the process of recruiting families involves matching what the children need and want.

“The kids will come in and say, ‘Ms. Linda, I used to go to this park and play, can you please try and find a family in this area?’” Robertson-Matson said.

She will begin searching in those desired towns and search for various types of families.

Many types families make good foster families

“In all my years of doing this, there is no one typical type of person who will make a great foster parent,” Klimczak said. “It is about your attitude, willingness to accept help from the program.”

Klimczak said foster families can include single moms, typical two-parent homes, retired couples and gay couples.

“Whatever defines family defines foster family,” Klimczak said. “As long as they pass the background check.”

Once a family has expressed an interest, they will undergo background checks which include fingerprinting, Department of Motor Vehicle checks and a physical, as well as a home study that looks at the environment in which the child would be placed.

Klimczak said they look at the upbringing of the parents, what the house is like, what the community is like, and whether the parents suffered trauma among other aspects.

“We are not expecting saints,” Klimczak said. “Many people hear foster parents and think saints; no, we are human beings.”

The only families Robertson-Matson and Klimczak said they discourage from applying are families who recently have experienced a tragedy such as a death of a family member and those who might be in financial crisis.

“We have had people who have had a variety of issues. It is how you work through them, that real life experience and having compassion, that actually is an advantage for people,” Klimczak said.

Support along the way

To help families through the issues their foster child may experience, Robertson-Matson said the agency provides training prior to the child entering the home and ongoing training throughout the time with the child.

Klimczak said the agency has a behaviorist, a registered nurse, a case worker who is assigned to each child, the child’s DCF worker and 24/7 support if families need to call.

Before the child enters a home, parents are given what Klimczak calls Parenting 101.

Foster families receive financial support, which can cover daily needs, respite care and funding for community activities for the children. These might include basketball clinics, arts and crafts activities or camps. DCF provides medically complex training, which may include training for gastro-intestinal, neurological, diabetes or other disorders, which gives them a medically complex license for the home. For more child-specific needs, Gary Kleeblatt, communications director for DCF, said foster families receive training from the child’s medical provider.

“These kids grew up going to special camps but now they are going to the YMCA camp with an aid and having a normal life, taking away the stigma of their past,” Klimczak said.

Klimczak said this is healing for the children since it takes away their diagnosis label.

“We are giving them back their childhood,” Robertson-Matson said.

Having a support system is important, as well, for families involved in this program.

“The parents provide support for one another, they provide respite care for each other, and it is good if the family has natural supports,” Klimczak said.

Training is continued throughout the time the child is with the foster family.

“The ongoing training piece focuses on the child’s issues,” Robertson-Matson said. “We want people to know we will work with their schedule.”

Working toward a good end

For Slen, this ongoing training and support is important. After 16 years and 10 foster children placed in her family home through CCF, Slen said it sometimes has not been easy.

“There was no way these people can tell you how tough these kids are,” Slen said.

Despite some rough patches, Slen has had five children stay with her for long periods and five for shorter periods. She currently has two foster children through CCF and Muhammad was living at home for the summer.

“If they could have shown me how difficult that first young man was, I probably wouldn’t have done it, so thank heavens I didn’t know,” Slen said.

Slen said that even if the children are tough, it is important to hang in there.

“It is kind of a hit or miss,” Slen said. “They sort of have to put children to families and some families will say, ‘Well I don’t want a girl,’ this one wants an older child, etc.”

Slen said she was very idealistic about the whole process when they first found out about CCF. Their process of becoming foster parents was very quick.

The two women who started the company were almost never in the office, since they did everything, but Slen said that once they got a hold of them, her husband talked with them on the phone and the next day the two women were at the Slen house conducting their home study.

Their first child was placed into the Slens’ home, but it was not as successful as they had hoped.

“We thought, ‘He had horrible things happen to him and nothing bad is going to happen to him here, it will be fine,’ but not so much,” Slen said. “We thought we would be able to make a break through and it would be fine, but we didn’t quite have it.”

Despite this, Slen and her husband worked with CCF, and said they were provided with all the services they could need.

“Whatever we could think of that we needed, they got it, whatever they thought we needed, they got it, whatever the state thought we need, they got it,” Slen said.

Slen said they had looked into regular foster care prior to this, but felt CCF was much more personal, as was the support.

Muhammad said he was able to experience this dedication and love when he got into a car accident during high school.

“The first thing on my mind was, I am so dead, literally and figuratively. My mother is going to kill me,” Muhammad said. “This guy was there, saying, ‘Are you all right, are you all right,’ and I just kept saying, ‘My mother is going to kill me.’”

When Slen arrived on the scene, Muhammad said she was worried about his safety first.

“Every time I got in trouble, the way they handled it made me feel like this was my home and it wasn’t the end of the world,” Muhammad said.

Muhammad said that despite the struggles that both the child and the parents will deal with, giving someone a family makes it worth it.

“Having to go into the foster care system acknowledging at a young age that I needed something else, it was awesome, it all happened like a dream,” Muhammad said. “I was having a nightmare and I am awake now, it is like a dream.”